


A Friend And A Lover

by ginkyou



Category: Elisabeth - Levay/Kunze
Genre: Death Is Not A Good Person, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family Issues, Historically Accurate Product Placement, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Nightmares, Political Discussions During Sex, Slight body image issues, Slow Burn, Somebody Please Help Crown Prince Rudolf, explicit sexual content in second chapter, so many issues, victim grooming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 08:19:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6147484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginkyou/pseuds/ginkyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recollections of some of the many times Death visited Rudolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In which terrible things happen to Rudolf, but at least there is sex in the end.
> 
> Based on [a request by an anon on tumblr](http://martinpasching.tumblr.com/post/138106906386/you-should-write-about-der-tod-fucking-rudolf-up). I put the requested smut into a separate chapter due to the change in pacing, hope you enjoy it, anon.
> 
> Beta'd by the absolutely wonderful [sithmarauder](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sithmarauder) <3

When the crown prince was still a child, his mother left.

He cried a lot. She didn't care. He wanted to watch her leave, wanted to see her step into her beautifully decorated horse-drawn carriage and go, but he couldn't see her through the tears spilling out of his eyes.

They made him stay submerged in his ice-cold bath for twice as long as usual that day.

She returned to court on a beautiful summer evening. It was not the last time she had made her way back to the palace, but it was the last time she ever hugged him. The crown prince was young and he did not yet understand the cruel ways of the world and the sorrow-filled bitterness of his mother's heart, but he could feel the hatred in her stiff arms. When she looked him in the eyes and bade him farewell, she was doing her best to feign a smile. He could read the hardened lines around her mouth well enough to know what she was really feeling. He never tried to hug another person after that.

Years later he finally understood that it wasn't him she had hated and feared, it was that the shadow that had followed her for years had begun to stalk him, too, and that it was this shadow she was fleeing, but by then it had been too late.

As the Empress turned to solitude, so did Rudolf.

 

The man who called himself his friend visited him for the first time not too long afterwards. The being, his body cold as ice, could not give him the human warmth that Rudolf so desperately craved, but the boy had not yet learned to fear him so he let himself be wrapped up in arms that seemed to draw the very essence of life from his veins, and he felt happy.

He let this strange visitor into his heart, and soon things began to change.

The man only came to him at night, after all the curtains had been drawn, the candles had been extinguished, and the sun had fully hidden itself beneath the horizon, creeping into Rudolf's room with the growing shadows. Sometimes he came to him when Rudolf was lying in bed, eyes closed, crawling to Rudolf's bedside and whispering glorious words of grandeur into Rudolf's sleep-clouded mind, thought he did not yet understand these words and the dreams they formed made him feel strange. The man's slick, sweet voice crawled into his ears and when he woke up afterwards, it'd made Rudolf's head buzz with the sound of a thousand angry bees. Sometimes after these visits Rudolf found himself coming to on the floor of his room. When he reached up to feel his face those nights, his brow was covered in sweat.

On some nights, his visitor touched him, and it was like his hands could slip under Rudolf's skin – now often burning to the touch – and reach through his corporeal form, grazing the soul inside of him and caressing it with long, spider-like fingers. After these visits, even when he awoke in his bed instead of next to it, Rudolf's face and pillow would be stained with blood that had burst from his nose.

Whenever his friend embraced him from then on, the boy's heart would beat in an unsteady staccato. Rudolf could hear no heartbeat in the cold man's chest but paid it no mind because his own was fast and loud enough for both of them. The more often his friend embraced him, the more Rudolf's heart grew restless even when his friend wasn't around, occasionally fluttering to a stop and resuming its work only after he had blacked out.

Rudolf's face grew paler and his eyelids heavy. The people around him could see him grow weaker, and they were worried. His servants began to speak about him in hushed whispers. They flinched from his red-eyed gaze. With time, he began to fear them just as they feared him.

As he grew older, the nightly visits happened less and less frequently. The longer his friend stayed away, the more Rudolf's physical health began to improve. His sickly, bony frame began to fill with the muscles of the soldier his father wanted him to be, and his eyes lost their milky sheen and slowly became almost as glossy as his mother's. His servants began to lose the tension they had carried in their shoulders for so many years, learning to joke about him having been a sickly child. The crown prince in turn learned to swallow the bile in his throat and laugh with them.

Rudolf grew stronger every day, his health improving as if the sun itself was nourishing him, and it was like a heavy veil had finally been lifted from the windows of the palace, allowing light to flood its rooms for the first time in years. The more Rudolf's health improved, the brighter the days seemed to become.

The nights, on the other hand, grew darker and darker.

Wild boars chased him in his dreams. Rudolf could feel the cold gaze of his father resting heavily upon him, watching him from somewhere in the distance, hidden from view. Rudolf knew that he could never reach him, but he so desperately wanted to at least meet his expectations. He also knew that his father was expecting him to face the boars, and that was something he could never accomplish. On some nights he tried, but he found himself waking up, screaming, the sound of his ripping flesh still echoing in his ears as his shaking hands patted his body down to confirm that yes, he was still whole.

He developed a habit of examining his face in the mirror. When the light around him grew dimmer, he felt an almost hypnotic draw to the glass pane. Rudolf touched his face, touched the reflection trapped in the glass, and felt that something was off. Something was changing about him, and it was not just the first hints of stubble that were beginning to show on his chin.

He began to hate the person he saw in the mirror. The pale skin that looked so beautiful on his mother looked sick on him and he detested the way his eyes betrayed his emotions no matter how hard he tried to hide them. Sometimes he found himself tearing at the skin of his face, trying to make it look the way he wanted it to and failing.

On bad days, the flickering candlelight made him see things behind him. Part of him wanted to cover the mirror when it was dark. The other part of him knew what he was waiting for, and that part made him return to the mirror night after night.

 

When his friend returned to him, it was raining, and even through the heavy fabric of the closed curtains he could hear the rain batter against the window. Maybe it was the unusual lighting, maybe it was the flame from the candle, but he as he stared at his face in the mirror he felt like his hair was growing thinner and lighter than usual. His mother in her unending selfishness had not given him a single part of herself, but he had hoped that he would at least inherit her beautiful brown locks. Apparently, she had kept even that feature to herself.

It was a particularly bad day. His mother had returned home once more, but she had not even wanted to see him. He knew, as only a child abandoned by its mother could know, that this was because he had disappointed her. He was not the prodigy son his mother and father had hoped for, he was a disappointment to them both. Thinking about this as he stared at his reflection in the mirror – neither the beautiful poet his mother wanted him to be nor the disciplined soldier his father had wished for – made him want to empty the contents of his stomach into a bucket.

There was a barely visible flash of movement behind him. He did not even have to look at it directly to recognize it. His heart leapt and he almost sent the candle he was holding flying to the ground as he spun around.

“It's you,” he blurted out, blindly setting the candle down and wishing his eyes would adjust to the dark faster.

“You remember me?” the being in the shadows asked in reply. “Good.”

They spent a long time together that night.

 

In the following years, he was never alone. His childhood friend became his everyday companion. With every passing month he could feel the bond between the two of them grow stronger. He quickly got to know the signs of his friend's impeding visits – little glimpses of something following him in every mirror he passed, crows sitting on branches above his path in numbers unheard of and following him with jet-black eyes, gasping awake at night and feeling like he had just missed something; that if he had awoken just a second earlier he would have been able to see whatever it was he had missed.

Death followed him wherever he went. He listened to Rudolf's angry speeches and read his articles. He watched the prince grow and his writing change from the clumsy rants of a child to the thought-out, well-written essays of an adult who had the power to change the world through words alone. Rudolf even dedicated some of his articles to him by forming pseudonyms from childhood jokes between them or using his friend's phrases as if they were his own.

Sometimes Death even contributed to Rudolf's writing directly and dictated his own thoughts on the matters at hand. Rudolf liked to read those essays to his friends on special occasions, and he could see the words enthralling them like they had him. Sometimes, when he and Death were sitting together in his smoking room, his friend suggested certain names, whispered certain locations and dates into his ears, and the crown prince followed these suggestions like an obedient dog. Occasionally he woke from a drunken stupor in some unknown house only to discover that it was an address his friend's silver tongue had put into his mind. As the people of Vienna began to grow restless and angry with the way the prince's father ruled them, Rudolf unwittingly found himself in places Death wanted him to be more and more often. As the anger turned into plans for revolt, Rudolf found that almost every day he woke up in some back-alley cafe still filled with angry shouts and rallying cries.

It did not take much for Rudolf to be swept up in the hurried, bustling energy of the impeding revolution. He tried to tell himself that the exhaustion that had begun to grip his every fiber, making his body feel heavy to the bone, was because he was spending so much time on the streets and in backrooms of smoke-filled coffee houses bristling with desire for fundamental change. The responsibility of having to be the one who brought this change to his country was something that had made him feel elated at first, but soon began to feel like lead upon his shoulders.

The nightmares returned. He found himself in the same boar pen, his body again that of a child. He began to dread sleep, filling his nights with coffee as black as the darkness outside and depending on the buzzing discussion of the coming era to stay awake. Men talking of the future and women cradling his body kept him company during those dark hours until he inevitably crashed and fell into pitch-black unconsciousness. Even then he always ended up gasping awake in terror. At least he could not remember the dreams that plagued him on those nights.

He hated returning home at night, he hated the quiet movements of the servants, he hated the way he still felt himself being drawn to the mirror, he hated the way the dimming candlelight made the angles of his face look sharp and sick, the shadows under his cheekbones black as ink, his eyes sunken deep into his skull. And even though he did not know why, what he hated most was that whenever he looked into the mirror, he always saw Death behind him, and while Death's presence was growing more and more prominent, he felt like his own reflection was fading.

He recognized these signs as the marks of someone who was being claimed by the one lurking behind him in the shadows. He was grateful that he was already too tired to care.

Sometimes he thought about running away just like his mother did, fleeing to the very edge of the world and beyond, just to get away from the monstrous shadow stalking him and the revolution looming in the future. He understood his mother now, understood the pain in her eyes. He tried to think about her and about the man that had courted them both since their youths, but he found it difficult to focus through the buzzing in his head. At night, his childhood friend again began to whisper secrets into his ears.

When Death left him again, to stalk his mother or estrange his father or maybe rally the people of the empire against their rulers, he was thankful. When his friend had not yet returned after several months, he grew frightened.

He'd thought that he feared Death, but even more than that he found he feared loneliness.

 

Death returned to Vienna as the nights grew colder and the shadows longer. Rudolf had dreaded the day for months, trying to stave off the feeling by throwing himself with even more fervor into the arms of alcohol and revolution, but he'd found that neither drink, nor drug, nor naked companions could erase the knowledge from his mind that things were coming to an end.

By the time Death pulled his mother's favorite cousin to a watery grave, the atmosphere at court had grown strange. The poison of fear slowly trickled through the palace, even infecting the streets and turning peaceful protests into desperate battles. People on the streets began to pull their coats closer to their bodies long before the first snow fell. Behind the palace gates, even the members of the court that had not yet dealt with Death personally could feel the foreboding signs of his impending arrival as winter neared. The shaky, scrawled handwriting of his distant mother's occasional letters arriving from halfway around the world betrayed that she knew, too.

But in the end, it would not be Death who'd come to Rudolf, rather Rudolf who'd come to Death.

 

Something in Rudolf knew before he even put his hand on the doorknob. When he opened the door and saw Death sitting on his bed, all of the apprehension Rudolf had carried in his body for the past few months disappeared. All he could feel was relief flooding through him. His friend was back, and Rudolf was finally whole again.

Rudolf fell into Death's arms, and Death did not mind. Rudolf clung to his suitor's stone-cold body like a drowning man hanging onto the side of a passing ship, buried his hands in the fabric of Death's suit, and gratefully drank in every word that fell from Death's lips. Death's voice drowned out all of Rudolf's worries. The looming collapse of the political system Rudolf himself was trying to dismantle, his own waning health, everything that had weighed so crushingly on him, felt like distant memories. And as Death whispered into his ear, told him of the past, the future and all things inbetween, Rudolf found it harder and harder to remember why he had ever feared him.

They spent what seemed like an eternity in this embrace, and Rudolf was ready for what was coming. He licked his lips and held his breath and waited. When Death unwrapped himself from Rudolf's body and slid away, disappearing into the shadows, Rudolf sobbed like he hadn't since the day his mother left.

 

Whenever Death visited him from then on, Rudolf began to feel strange. He tried to write down the words Death told him, but he found that his vision seemed to blur and his hands lost all feeling when Death drew near, and that when Death touched him, Rudolf felt hot and his brain strangely fogged. He also found that it was not an all around unpleasant feeling.

And that was why, when he felt Death's icy breath on his neck on one of the many nights he spent examining his face in the mirror, Rudolf did not shy away.


	2. Chapter 2

Rudolf did not turn around immediately. He could not see Death in the mirror because his own body was blocking his view, but he had not been surprised by the sudden sensation of Death's cold breath on the back of his neck, either. When he finally did turn around, he did so slowly and thoughtfully. There was something he felt he ought to say, but he found that his throat had seized up.

Death had been directly behind him, and now that Rudolf was facing him, the distance between them was even smaller. Rudolf found that he did not think of this as strange. They stood like this for some seconds, Rudolf trying to figure out the expression on Death's face, but it was as unreadable as ever. Silence hung between them as they watched each other intently, Death's gaze so piercing that Rudolf found that he could not meet it with his eyes.

Rudolf almost flinched when Death advanced on him, no matter how fluid the man's motions were. He had no choice but to back away. Rudolf took two short steps and then the mirror stopped him, pressing into his back, the glass surface almost as cold to the touch as Death's body. Rudolf was thankful that he was still wearing the set of worker's clothes he usually wore to hide his royal upbringing when he was out and about, fanning the flames of the revolution. The scratchy, coarse wool and linen were not as comfortable as his usual regalia or even his uniform, but the many layers provided at least some protection against the cold now threatening to seep into his bones.

Death reached out slowly. His fingertips slid gently over Rudolf's face, and Rudolf gasped involuntarily at the icy touch. Death continued to move his fingers softly over Rudolf's skin, cradling his face with long, elegant fingers. There was not a hint of warmth in his hands, and Rudolf could feel the hair on the back of his neck begin to stand up. Rudolf sucked in a surprised breath as Death's ice-cold palms made contact with his cheeks, his teeth beginning to chatter slightly. Wool was no protection against the chill of the grave. It was not the first time Death had touched him like that, but this time Rudolf felt there was something different about his embrace.

He could feel his skin warming up, trying to combat the cold coming from the other man's body. He also felt something else, something tensing inside him, muscles waking up and blood beginning to flow downwards, but he tried his best to brush that feeling aside.

It was not like this feeling was new to him – he had thrown himself into the throes of pleasure many nights before, with people of many different genders. The heat of physical passion could drown out the hatred he felt for himself for a while, so he indulged in it quite gladly. But feeling this emotion while being touched by the person he had gotten to known as Death, no matter how much affection Rudolf felt for him, was something else entirely.

This close to Death, Rudolf had no choice but to examine his companion's face with just as much intensity as he studied his own in the mirror, but while he had watched his own face change radically over the years, his suitor had stayed the same. The same piercing eyes, the same radiantly pale skin, the same soft lips.

The same soft lips indeed.

His eyes lingered on Death's mouth. His lips looked beautiful, really, better than any others he'd ever seen. And they looked like they tasted just as nice.

 

He shook his head, or rather tried to, as Death's hands were still holding him firmly in place. Rudolf's gaze was still glued to Death's lips. He tried to look away, but found that no matter where he looked, his eyes always wandered back to them. There was something about them that made him feel _needy_. Judging from the way the corners of Death's lips had turned up into a smirk, his partner knew exactly what he was feeling.

Rudolf was quite thankful when Death moved, finally making him able to tear his eyes from those beautiful lips. Death slowly withdrew one of his hands from Rudolf's head, trailing the tips of his fingers over Rudolf's cheekbones, lingering on the curves of his face in a way that made Rudolf shudder. His other hand gripped the back of Rudolf's head now, burying his fingers in Rudolf's hair, and with his free hand Death began to undo Rudolf's shirt, diligently and carefully opening button after button. Rudolf felt like he should say something but found that he had forgotten how to speak. His head was buzzing again, but it was not the painful noise he knew from his childhood, rather a muted, pleasant sound of static that lulled him into an almost meditative state, like the crackling of a phonograph.

Rudolf leaned back against the mirror and slowed his breathing, taking in deep, long breaths as carefully as he could as if he feared that any sound he made might break his partner's concentration. Between Rudolf's soft breathing, Death's graceful movements and the sound of buttons being undone, the room was almost quiet. If somebody had so much as dropped a needle in the room, it would have sounded like a thunderclap. By the time Death finally popped the last button, Rudolf's body was trembling.

Rudolf reached a hand out and laid his palm on Death's chest, resting his fingers on the soft, thick fabric. He wanted to pull him towards him, wanted the two of them to embrace in a kiss that would last for millennia, but something in him instinctively made him resist that desire. Instead, Death leaned forward and closed the last bit of distance between their bodies, Rudolf's face resting in the cradle of his neck. Rudolf was shaking now, the cold having penetrated the last layer of protective clothing. When Death took off Rudolf's jacket and his shirt rode up on his arms, the momentarily exposed skin became covered in goosebumps.

The only thing Rudolf could think of now were Death's lips. As Death's hands moved to explore his body, Rudolf's began to kiss Death's cold neck, moving upwards. Rudolf's kisses were hesitant at first, mere flutters of lips against skin, but the closer he got to Death's mouth the greedier they became. Without really realizing it he kissed the edges of his mouth and finally hovered there, lips desperate for contact. He sucked in the huffs of cold air coming from Death's mouth, panting. His own lips were burning even though he still felt like his body was freezing, and he wanted nothing more than to feel the chill of Death's mouth and taste his tongue no matter what might happen.

One of Death's hands had found their way to Rudolf's hips, still on top of the fabric, and it moved between his legs with a soft, almost curious motion. Rudolf jerked forward at the touch, his lips brushing against Death's. He moved back immediately, breathing heavily, but it had been close enough to make him feel faint and lightheaded.

Death turned him around and Rudolf was almost thankful for not having to be close to his lips anymore. He let his head rest against the mirror. The glass felt cool against his flushed skin. Out of the corner of his half-closed eyes he could see Death remove his jacket, carefully putting it to the side. He almost found the will to make a joke about how Death was being overly concerned with his appearance even now, but Death pressed his body against Rudolf's before he could find his voice and by the time Death reached around his hips and slid his hands under the waistband of Rudolf's pants, resting his fingers under the fabric of his underwear and lazily gliding his thumbs over his hipbones, Rudolf had forgotten any remarks he had wanted to make.

Death slid Rudolf's suspenders off with just as much as care as he'd used on Rudolf's shirt buttons, and when he removed his hands from Rudolf's body to undo his own belt, Rudolf groaned impatiently and shrugged off his open shirt himself to speed up the process a bit. Listening to the sound of clanging metal and fabric being removed, Rudolf wondered how many people Death had done this with already. The image of his mother popped into his mind and he physically tensed, trying to push the thought from his mind as quickly as possible. His mother was not exactly what he wanted to focus on now.

Still, it wasn't like he could blame Death for falling for her. She was radiantly beautiful, unlike Rudolf himself, who had inherited her melancholy and hatred of the constricting world of the court but none of her grace or beauty. If he had not been her son, he thought, he likely would have fallen for her like so many other men did.

This was not something he wanted to think about now, or ever, really. Rudolf huffed with frustration and shifted his weight back onto his feet, leaning back a bit to watch Death undress. Death really was the most beautiful being he had ever seen. Watching him made Rudolf feel torn – he felt the deepest, most longing desire for Death, more than he had ever felt for anyone, but his perfect form also reminded him that between Death and himself, Rudolf's own body was painfully inadequate. At least his head was beginning to clear again, now that Death had moved away from him.

 

“You know,” Death said, his tone casual enough that it sounded out of place in their current situation, “you could change the course of history if you wanted to.” Rudolf found it in himself to scoff. Death looked up in response, gaze fixed to the reflection of Rudolf's eyes. Rudolf felt dizzy. He grabbed onto the frame of the mirror to steady himself.

“It's true. You know the way the people think of you,” Death continued. Rudolf swallowed nervously. He could feel his brain fogging up under Death's gaze. He shied away, walking over to his desk and digging through the mess of papers and empty bottles of wine on it.

“They whisper about you in the streets. They sing about you in the bars. They write about you in the papers. They look at you, and for the first time in centuries, they think to themselves that they see somebody they actually _want_ to be in power. They look at you, and they see the future.” Rudolf's fingers were trembling now, head spinning. He felt relief rush through him as his fingers brushed against what he was looking for. One of the perks of being around ladies of comparably light virtue was always being on top of the newest inventions in that area, and one such invention was the small jar of petroleum jelly shipped in from across the sea that he now reached for. “They look at you, and they see an emperor.” Rudolf's hand came to a stop at the last word. Something about it made him hold his breath. Death noticed.

Rudolf shuddered and grabbed the jar of Vaseline. When he faced his suitor again, Death was smiling. Rudolf tried not to let it bother him. He also tried not to stumble as he returned to his companion but found that his legs almost gave out halfway across the room. He obeyed gratefully when Death motioned for him to turn around and lean against the mirror, thankful that the glass could steady his body.

Death pressed a kiss to his neck, tasting the salty sweat that covered it. The sensation was unlike anything Rudolf had ever felt before. It hurt, almost like a small electric shock sustained over several seconds, and provided a distraction for when Death inserted a lube-covered digit into him, gently exploring his insides with cold fingers. Rudolf squirmed against his hand, senses overloaded, and involuntarily arched his back, further bucking his hips into Death's grip. As Death removed his finger and withdrew his head, Rudolf could see in the mirror that the skin he had kissed had changed to a lifeless gray, though blood was flowing back to the area quickly.

The sudden feeling of Death's cold cock against his ass almost made Rudolf jump. He laughed nervously under his breath and was quite relieved when he heard Death chuckling too. Taking a deep breath, Rudolf steadied himself against the mirror, watching his partner's reflection.

When Death entered him, Rudolf gasped. No matter how prepared he thought he was, the sensation of being filled by a cock colder than ice was overwhelming. He pressed himself against the mirror, his own erection touching the glass, fingers clawing at the reflective surface in a desperate attempt to get a better grip. At least the petroleum jelly began to warm up after the first few thrusts, and the more he relaxed into the movement, the less the cold inside his body bothered him.

Rudolf let his head roll slightly to side, shifting his upper body slightly but still steadying himself against the mirror with both of his hands, and Death began to trail kisses down the side of his neck. “Emperor Rudolf,” Death purred in between kisses, and Rudolf moaned at the phrase. He closed his eyes and let the feeling overtake him, muscles relaxing and then tensing up again every time he felt his lips on his skin, beginning to roll his hips to match Death's thrusts.

“You are going to become the emperor, and your reign will be great,” Death continued, voice sweet as honey as he paused at the nape of Rudolf's neck. Rudolf's whole body was tense now, skin flushed, breathing labored. Death braced him as he matched the speed of his movements to his words. “You will be great and magnificent. There will be elections, parliaments, freedom, all under you, Emperor Rudolf.” Rudolf arched his back into Death's grip in wordless reply, letting his head fall back.

As their movements gradually sped up, Rudolf could feel the tension in his stomach rising. He was close. Death had buried his face in Rudolf's hair and from the way he was panting, Rudolf assumed that he felt just the same. Whereas before they had both been moving slowly and carefully, they now found a new rhythm, quick and almost animalistic as Rudolf moved his hips in time with Death's movements, his breath fogging up the glass. He found it harder and harder to support himself against the mirror, perspiration trickling down its surface, hands slipping as Death's hips moved quicker and harder. The rougher his movements became, the deeper Death dug his fingernails into Rudolf's hipbones. Rudolf barely barely registered the sharp pain, brain overwhelmed with pleasure.

Death shifted his grip on Rudolf's hips and moved one of his hands between Rudolf's legs. Rudolf mewled gratefully against the mirror when Death began to stroke his cock, pumping in time with the movement of his own hips. He thrust into Rudolf, movements becoming frantic, breathing becoming erratic, and as Rudolf tensed against his cock, Death buried himself in him and came with a wordless moan, hand clawing at Rudolf's hip, pulling him flush to his body. Death's hand tightened around Rudolf's cock and a moment later Rudolf's eyes rolled back into his head as his hips bucked forward in release, gasping for air, cum splattering against the mirror. Pleasure rolled through them as they rode the waves of their orgasms together, Death's cold body pressed against Rudolf's, hand still clasped around his cock.

 

Death was the first to find his breath again. His body was trembling when he slid out of Rudolf, and when Rudolf opened his eyes again he could see that his partner's hand was shaking as he withdrew it from between Rudolf's legs. Rudolf himself was shaking now. He looked at himself in the mirror and frowned. His reflection looked like an utter mess – naked, quaking, covered in sweat, hair sticking to his forehead, hips bruised, cock still twitching. He tentatively shifted his weight back onto his feet, but his knees gave out immediately and he slid down to the floor. Mind still hazy, he covered himself in the shirt he had shrugged off and absentmindedly watched Death dress himself. Death was using one of Rudolf's monogrammed cloth tissues to clean himself off. He tossed one at Rudolf and Rudolf barely reacted fast enough to catch it. Rudolf gazed down at his hands and saw that his fingernails were blue.

“Clean yourself up,” Death said, dropping the tissue onto the bed and picking up his pants. “You wouldn't want to let your mother see you like this, would you?” Rudolf just grimaced.

 

The next time they met, Rudolf was holding a gun, and on that day he learned that once you were caught in Death's web, you were caught until the very end.


End file.
